A major site update was posted today, and while you may not notice the change immediately, there are a number of impactful changes.

The first is removing support for Google Reader since it no longer exists, but that's mostly about syncing and importing feeds since feed fetching and parsing has always been handled separately.

The second major change is one you'll notice when marking page read. Instead of losing the status of the previous page, marking paged read will still take the expected action, but will also advance a page with the previous one(s) being cached locally. This will be particularly helpful if you need to go back to correct a mistake.

Another benefit of these changes is improved performance. The new paging methodology prevents preloads from getting invalidated as frequently so the data that is needed will still be on hand. Performance is also improved through some Javascript optimizations to reduce the number of DOM lookups, although some slower processors can sometimes take a little longer to save current item states before turning a page.

GPUs are now used for animations so those should be smoother than previously.

Viewing a Similar Items page and returning to the previous feed is now much faster too. When selecting the Return to Previous Feed link it will load all of the previous data instead of refetching it from the server.

The same is also true when emailing a story. And on the topic of sharing, that menu now scrolls up over the item's content instead of expanding down.

That about does it other than bug fixes and other minor changes that I won't call you individually. We hope you enjoy the new site and we'll continue to work on further improvements.